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WATCHING MOVIES WITH/ANG LEE

WATCHING MOVIES WITH/ANG LEE; Crouching Memory, Hidden Heart

By RICK LYMAN

Published: March 9, 2001

Correction Appended

ANG LEE sat on a swivel chair, his hands folded, a bank of dark monitors before him. ''Every time I see this movie, I cry,'' he said. ''It's a little embarrassing. From when I was a little boy until now, I always cry.'' Sure enough, he just thought about it, and his eyes began to moisten.

The unadorned white space, its paint slightly peeling, is one of the gadget-filled editing suites in the offices of Good Machine, an independent film financing and distribution company where Mr. Lee makes his headquarters. It is in a thick, slightly dingy building near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, within muted earshot of the cacophonous tumult of Canal Street. Mr. Lee took a videocassette of Li Hanxiang's ''Qi Cai Hu Bu Gui'' -- which Mr. Lee said is best translated into English as ''Love Eternal'' -- from its blank white sleeve, and with a mechanical whoosh it slid into one of the VCR's.

''I am sorry, this is the only version I have of this film,'' he said. ''It is O.K.?''

A truck rumbled by outside. Mr. Lee, 46, swiveled to face the largest of the monitors, which flickered then burst to light, a Chinese fanfare over the sparkling, gaudy logo of the Shaw Brothers' Hong Kong film studio. It was O.K.

''This is a movie I don't always think about, until you asked me to pick one movie to watch,'' Mr. Lee said. ''I think the reason I wanted to talk about this movie is because it reminds me always of my innocence.''

It was 1963. Mr. Lee was 9, living in a small town called Hwalian on the east coast of Taiwan, the self-described naïve son of a school principal. His was a traditional Chinese household, with servants, Mandarin sensibilities and a yearning, shared with most of its neighbors, for a kind of dream vision of the old, lost China of the mainland.

''I think that for every movie I make, I always try to duplicate that feeling of purity and innocence that I got when I saw this movie,'' he said. ''I bring in Western drama. I bring in metaphor. I bring in Jean-Luc Godard. Whatever I bring in to my own films, I am forever trying to update and recapture that feeling. I call it juice -- the juice of the film -- the thing that moves people, the thing that is untranslatable by words.''

When watching a favorite film, Mr. Lee said, most directors will inevitably concentrate on the craft, the strategic bursts of directorial inspiration, and indeed he did, too, while watching this film.

''But how a scene was shot, that is minor to me,'' he said. ''It is more the juice, the core emotion, how it moves us. It is whether the whole film works at a deep level. You know, that primo feeling. There is no word for it. But that is what this movie did to me, and ever since, I am always trying to recapture it.''

''Love Eternal'' was a stupendously popular, melodramatic version of a Chinese opera that was already familiar to many of the Taiwanese who flocked to see it in the mid-1960's, when it was a recurring favorite across East Asia.

''I was able to recite the whole movie before I ever got to see it,'' Mr. Lee said. When this film opened to acclaim in Taipei, the entire soundtrack, music and dialogue, was released on a four-record set, and Mr. Lee's family bought it. But he lived far from the capital, and it took several months for the film to make its way to his coastal town. He spent those weeks listening to it over and over until he could recite the entire movie.

The film became so popular in Taiwan that some claimed to have seen it 500 times, Mr. Lee said. Lines of its dialogue became part of everyday conversation, the way catch-phrases from a ''Saturday Night Live'' routine (''You look maaahvalous!'') can sometimes permeate American pop culture.

''People would take two box lunches, go the theater and watch it all day long,'' he said. ''My parents were watching it often. I remember the third time they went to see it, there was a typhoon coming, and they still left us at home. 'O.K., we're going to see this movie, bye.' '' He laughed. ''And this was on a typhoon night.'' The film was popular with everyone, he said, from children to housewives to university intellectuals.

''It was a big hit in China, but particularly in Taiwan,'' Mr. Lee said. ''This is because of the Mandarin culture in the movie. We had escaped from the mainland in the civil war, and we missed that culture. For those of us too young to remember the mainland, we did not really know the old culture. So when we would see it in this movie, we would think, 'Oh, that is China.' When I went back to China to make 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,' I knew nothing about the real China. I had this image in my mind, from movies like this. So I projected these images as my China, the China in my head.''

A Musical Fantasy

The China in Mr. Lee's head is a sumptuous fantasyland of rich homes and sparkling streams and forest pagodas, interrupted by the tragic calls to duty of the traditional codes of filial piety and social loyalty. It is the setting of Mr. Lee's ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' which received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Lee's direction, and has become the biggest foreign-language box-office hit in American movie history.

''Love Eternal'' is not ''the greatest movie ever made,'' Mr. Lee said. ''But there is something so honest and straightforward about it. I cry. I always cry. But I watch it for that feeling, the feeling of the innocence of watching a movie and wanting to believe.''

The main purpose of this series is to gain some insight into film artists' creative geography by watching films that had a resonant impact upon them. But it is also an attempt to give people a fresh look at great films from the past, through the eyes of important artists, or to introduce readers to films they might not have seen. For this second purpose, ''Love Eternal'' may be a problem because it is rarely seen in the United States outside a handful of Chinese-language cinemas or university programs and is unavailable commercially. Only a lucky consumer might stumble across a copy from abroad in some out-of-the-way video shop.

So, in the theory that very few have seen it and very few are likely to see it anytime soon, a fuller description of its plot may be necessary:

''Love Eternal'' is based on a well-known Chinese opera, a fantasy of beauty, grace and tragedy performed in a heightened mode of theatricality. Le Di plays a young woman from a prosperous family in a small town. She is miserable in her cloistered life. Smart, curious and eager to learn, she persuades her old-fashioned parents to let her go to school in a nearby city disguised as a boy, as girls were not allowed to study.

On the road, at a streamside pagoda, she meets Ling Po, playing another student heading for the school, and they immediately become friends. After some comic episodes about whether her friend will discover that she is a woman -- checking her for a fever when she is sick, asking her to go swimming in the river -- Le Di finds herself falling in love.

When she is forced to leave the school and return home, she confesses her secret to a woman who works at the school, and they plot to find a way to bring the couple together. Yet during the long journey back to the streamside pagoda where they met (Ling Po accompanies her on part of the trek home), she repeatedly tries but fails to find the courage to confess her secret. Finally, in a burst of inspiration, she tells him that she has a twin sister at home, and she promises her sister's hand in marriage.

But when Le Di gets home, she finds that her parents have promised her to an even more prominent local family's son. She is devastated but trapped by the code of filial piety. She must obey her father. She has also made a solemn promise to her friend, however, and the code of social loyalty is almost equally binding. Back at the school Ling Po finds out that his schoolmate is a woman and, overjoyed, begins an immediate journey to claim his promised bride.

When he arrives, in the film's most impassioned scene, his song of joy is crushed by the news that Le Di has been promised to another. He immediately begins to show signs of fever and consumption. Making his way back to the school, he dies pitifully in a bloody coughing fit. Le Di, when she hears the news, agrees to go ahead with her arranged marriage, but only if the procession passes the forest knoll upon which her true love's grave lies.

There, she rips off her wedding cloak to reveal funeral raiment and sings an impassioned aria to her lost love. The heavens respond, stirring up a cyclone that sweeps away the wedding party and splits her lover's grave like a coconut. Inside, she sees a ghostly image of her love and rushes to join him. The cyclone buries the grave under a mound of dirt, but a final image shows the lovers reunited, flying through the air across a rainbow bridge to the gate of a heavenly paradise.

Perplexing Elements

''People think that the Chinese films being made now, for the last 10 years, are the real traditional Chinese films,'' Mr. Lee said. ''But they are not. Films like this one are the real traditional films. All of these movies today, even mine, are always an attempt to break away from this tradition. I think I only broke halfway, and the other half, I just couldn't stay away.''

Mr. Lee is soft-spoken and reflexively self-effacing, blushing frequently when he is caught crying. But he can also be demanding. He sent his assistant out the night before the screening with a copy of the film, insisting that I watch it before we were to see it together, so I could concentrate on the images and the discussion and not be distracted by reading the subtitles and trying to decipher the plot.

He also wanted me to get over my initial reaction to what, to Western audiences, would be the most distracting and perplexing things about the film: both of the lead roles, that of the girl and her school boyfriend, are played by women.

''For many years, 10 years or more, this was the most popular kind of film, these melodramas,'' Mr. Lee said. ''The woman always played the main male roles, especially if it was romantic. It was a tradition from Chinese opera, where the prettiest man's part was played by a woman. As a compliment, you would say of a man, 'He is so pretty, he looks like a woman.' At the same time, if a woman was supposed to be ugly, a man would play that part. So for 10 years no one wanted to see men play men. It was difficult for men to get work. And then around 1970 it all changed, and the martial-arts movies began, and it all became very macho and male.''

This movie, he said, is one of the pinnacles of that older, feminine style. But while some educated or gay audiences might have seen a homosexual subtext in the story line, to most audiences at the time it was just accepted at face value. ''The audience was not confused,'' he said. ''They saw the man as a man, not as a woman pretending to be a man, although at the same time they also appreciate that it was a woman pretending to be a man. Part of the appreciation was watching how well the woman could pretend to be a man.''

Easier for the Audience

Having women express romantic emotions for one another was simply easier for the audience to accept. ''Men and women, unless they are married, they must never touch, even on the stage,'' he said. ''So because it is two women, there was no sense of lust for the audience.

''Think of it, though: it is a really kinky story. Very sexy. But to audiences at the time, there was no sense of being sexy. It is all pure, sexless, like an all-boys choir. To have seen a real man expressing romantic feelings for a woman on the screen would have been too strong for the audiences then. China was a very repressed society.''

Mr. Lee said he recognized that there was something about the plot of ''Love Eternal'' that was more than a little reminiscent of ''Yentl'' (1983), another film in which a girl dresses up as a boy to go to school. ''Yentl,'' based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story and starring Barbra Streisand, is set in the world of the shtetl. The similarities between these films is shallow, Mr. Lee said, noting that while the setup for the two stories was similar, the way they played out and the message they imparted were entirely different. '' 'Yentl' is 'Yentl,' '' he said.

Modern audiences may find it difficult to ignore that a woman is playing the male lead. The movie continually teases the audience with this. In one early scene Le Di dresses up as a male doctor to convince her parents that she will be able to pull off the deception at school. She looks nothing like a man. Nothing. But her parents are completely fooled. ''The whole idea is just too wacky for the parents to realize what is going on,'' Mr. Lee said.

Mr. Lee smiled as the Shaw Brothers logo spilled across the screen. ''Look, look, do you see that?'' he asked, freezing the videotape and rolling it back. ''Look at this dissolve.'' As the letters sparkled on the screen, a very subtle shadow rolled over the speckled background, giving it a faint three-dimensional look.

''I always noticed that when I was a little boy,'' he said happily. He closed his eyes and began to sing along, softly but audibly, to the song behind the opening credits.

''No other Chinese film affected me the way this one did,'' he said. ''I felt it so strongly.''

Beyond Storytelling

Not until he was 18, he said, did he begin to see films from abroad. Fellini's ''Roma'' was the first. ''It was only then that I realized that movies could do more than tell me a story,'' Mr. Lee said. Yet in later years, only a few films ever had the same impact on him as ''Love Eternal.'' Ingmar Bergman's ''Virgin Spring'' was one, Vittorio De Sica's ''Bicycle Thief,'' Yasujiro Ozu's ''Tokyo Story,'' Michelangelo Antonioni's ''Eclipse.'' Those are the only titles that came to mind, he said.

''These are the movies that affect you so deeply that you feel that you are a different person from the one who went into the theater,'' he said.

No recent film has moved him as deeply, he said.

''It is harder and harder to get to me,'' he said. ''Especially after I started making movies. I don't remember when I have cried in a movie theater. If I do, it is because it reminds me of something else. It's not the movie that makes me do it, because I have become too much in the habit of watching how the people do it, to concentrate on the making of the film.''

The opening shot of ''Love Eternal'' is a street scene, shot from far overhead, a long line of storefronts ending at an ornate gate, the streets teeming. This cuts to the shot of a balcony, the beautiful heroine standing at the railing. A chorus sings the introduction: the poor girl is miserable and trapped.

Cut to a closer shot of the girl. She looks out at the passing scene, a nearby pond, the sky. Then she turns and enters the room, where a maid tries to console her.

'Only Through Metaphor'

''Here is how it was always done with the Chinese films,'' Mr. Lee said. ''You begin with the exterior, then the framing; then you go close up to a person, then to what that person is watching, often something in nature, and only then to the internal feeling of that character. You look out the window, you see the moon, then you look down at yourself.

''You go from the setting, to the person, to the looking at nature, to the internal feelings. This was as close as Chinese could get to psychoanalysis. We just didn't go there directly, only through metaphor.''

Immediately Mr. Lee began to point out the elements in the plot that were different from those of similar melodramas of the period. First and most central, the parents are depicted as wrong-headed. Unwittingly but unbendingly they make one wrong call after another and end up destroying their daughter's life.

Usually, Mr. Lee said, parents were unerringly wise. Second, the heroine is the smartest person in the movie, the only one who, in scene after scene, sees events clearly. In one important episode she even proves herself wiser in the teachings of Confucius than her male classmates.

This, Mr. Lee said, was probably not done in an attempt to upend the social order, though to some audiences it might have had that effect. More likely, he said, it was simply to heighten the tragedy.

''Love Eternal'' was an opera that originated in a small company in Hwangme, outside Shanghai. Even though the operas were created as full-length stories, it was rare for audiences to see them performed that way, he said. More usually, touring companies would do a kind of music hall revue, beginning with some martial-arts acrobatics for the children, then some ''mediocre material,'' he said. Only at the end would they perform a few scenes from an opera.

That is why, he said, the operas were divided into distinct chapters -- easily discernible when watching the movie -- and each chapter had a name, usually a bit of poetry. In ''Love Eternal,'' especially popular was the sequence called ''18-Mile Escorting,'' during which the two lovers make their return journey to the pagoda, singing all the way, staring at fish and other creatures that miraculously mirror their inner state.

''It is very operatic; do you see that gesture?'' Mr. Lee said, mimicking the graceful way Ling Po twirls a hand fan. ''See the way the actresses twirl the fan. It is a certain way of movement, to make it graceful. It is all beautifying, you know.

''Everything in these stories is made more beautiful. In 'Crouching Tiger,' in the tavern fight sequence, I referred to this, but using a fan made of metal.''

He laughed at this. But in a way, he said, it is the crux of what ''Crouching Tiger'' was about, for him: an attempt to blend the two dominant genres of Chinese filmmaking, the feminine operatic melodrama, like ''Love Eternal,'' and the masculine martial-arts adventure, and to do it in a way that also integrates Western notions of psychoanalytical character development.

''What I did in 'Crouching Tiger' was a little unnatural for the industry,'' he said. ''It is my idea of martial arts films, as I think they should be. But I had no confidence when I was making it. I wanted to appeal to the Asian audiences and to the Western art-house audience. I had no idea of it crossing over to the Western mainstream, as it has.''

Paced to the Music

The operatic sequences in ''Love Eternal'' are the most distinctive, the ones that elicit the greatest response from Mr. Lee. The film splits almost in half, the first portion played almost entirely for comedy and the second portion as tragedy. From the moment the lovers part at the pagoda, the comedy withers and the tears begin to flow.

''Oh, look, did you see that camera move?'' Mr. Lee asked. ''It was so subtle. Here, let's take another look.''

He wound the tape back. Ling Po is escorting Le Di back to the pagoda. Time and again, she has tried to tell her secret to her love, but either Ling Po has proved too dense or Le Di has lost her nerve.

Ling Po crosses a bridge, but Le Di hangs back. For the first time she has second thoughts about whether she should tell her secret at all, because it would mean disobeying her father.

In the shot Le Di is walking, singing, her arms moving in graceful rhythm with the music. Then she stops and takes two steps backward.

The camera makes a very slight movement away from her -- on either a dolly or a track, it is unclear -- while equally subtly the lens zooms in on her. She steps back, the camera pulls farther back, but the lens moves forward. It is a slight moment of discombobulation.

''Notice the way the music slows down, and her movements,'' he said. ''I don't know why he does this, but it has the effect of making us realize that something important has happened. And it is a signal to the audience, I think, that something sad is coming.''

Throughout the film, in the manner of all traditional Chinese operas, the actresses modulate their movements and even the pace of their lines to match the rhythm of the music. They twirl, pose, speak rapidly as the music pulses, then freeze, pose and speak more slowly as the pulse slows.

''It is so beautiful, isn't it?'' Mr. Lee said, following one such sequence, beating out the rhythmic modulations in the air with one hand while the other swirled gracefully in the air to the melody. ''The subtitles are not good. The lyrics are so beautiful here. They are poetry.'' He began to hum softly.

What many Western audiences -- and even some Asian audiences -- do not realize is how much martial-arts films, which have become so popular in the last quarter-century, owe to the traditions of Chinese opera.

''They are all choreographed in the same way,'' Mr. Lee said. ''Pose, re-establish position, pose again. It is all the same.''

Escape in the Clouds

In the last minutes of the film, from the death of Ling Po -- blood spilling into a pond -- until the transcendent ending, with the two lovers flying to heaven, Mr. Lee cried continuously. He shrugged sheepishly about it.

''When I was a boy I would weep so loudly in this movie that other people in the row, who had also been crying, would suddenly get quiet and wonder who was making that noise,'' he said.

Mr. Lee said it was not until he was rewatching ''Love Eternal,'' about a month ago, that he realized how similar the film's ending was to the final shot in ''Crouching Tiger,'' with the girl leaping off the bridge high in the mountain and flying through the clouds.

The scene was in the book that Mr. Lee adapted, but he said he now thought that it was no coincidence that it had appealed to him so much. At some level, he said, he was remembering this scene from ''Love Eternal,'' the literal flying in escape.

And the themes of both films, he said, are strikingly similar, about lovers who, because of the strictures of filial piety and duty, cannot speak openly about their romantic feelings.

''It is, I think, the great Chinese theme,'' Mr. Lee said. ''For the Chinese audience, it is just in our blood. You must hide your feelings. That becomes the art itself, the metaphor and the symbolism, the use of color and framing.

''It is a way of not saying something but of expressing it anyway. And it is such an emotional outlet, especially for a repressed society. That is the heart of both films, the repressed emotional wish. That is the hidden dragon.''

Love Without Words

And that was the juice in ''Crouching Tiger,'' Mr. Lee said, the love unable to find words.

In ''The Ice Storm,'' he said, the juice came from one word, embarrassment, that he tried to weave through the story in a kind of fugue. In his ''Sense and Sensibility,'' it was the moment of transition, when the two sisters, played by Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, exchanged personalities, one suddenly becoming more outgoing and impulsive, the other more sober and analytical.

''To me, how people make this and that scene is less important than what makes us make our movies,'' Mr. Lee said. ''What spoke to you and, eventually, whether you transmit that emotion to the audience. The juice, it's indescribable.''

He pressed a button and with another whoosh the videocassette slid from its mechanical womb.

''The intellectualizing, the analysis -- that can come later,'' Mr. Lee said. ''In my movies, I hope that is all in hiding. It is the juice that we want. I think that's what brings us to the movie theater. All the ways and means and heart are just vehicles, ways of peering down through a protection, to reach that juicy part that is very vulnerable and that you can only reach when you are in the dark, in a movie theater, and you are with people.''

Watching Movies With . . .

This article is the seventh in a series of discussions with noted directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers and others in the film industry. In each article, one filmmaker selects and discusses a movie that has personal meaning. Previous articles focused on Quentin Tarantino, Janusz Kaminski, Ron Howard, Curtis Hanson, Kevin Costner and Steven Soderbergh.

Correction: March 21, 2001, Wednesday A ''Watching Movies With . . .'' article in Weekend on March 9, about the director Ang Lee, misstated the Mandarin title of the 1963 film ''Love Eternal,'' which he discussed. It is ''Liang Shan Bo Yu Zhu Ying Tai,'' named for two characters who fall in love. (''Qi Cai Hu Bu Gui'' was a 1966 film bearing the same English title.) A listing of films with the article substituted some credits from the 1966 work for those of the 1963 ''Liang Shan.'' Its producer was Shao Yi Fu (not Shang Wen); its cinematographers were Hur Lan Shan and Dai Chia Tai (not Lun Sun); its music was by Chow Lan Ping (not Zigengsheng Chen); and its screenplay writers were uncredited (not Yuanwen Li and Qiuhua Pang).